Sharing Learning through Documents: Conflicting Outcomes

Project team working is increasingly common in all types of organization and industry. However, research has also illustrated that often project teams do not meet their objectives and, moreover, there appears to be limited learning from the experiences of project teams so that the same mistakes and problems are encountered time and again. Drawing upon the work of Zoller and Winter one would anticipate that building a project working capability would depend on formalized processes of learning reviews and documentation of that learning. However, in practice, while such processes are common, they are not considered to be very helpful. Qualitative data presented in this paper supports this. However, the quantitative data suggests an opposite picture. The opposing results from the two different methods are explored in relation to Boland and Tenkasi´s notions of perspective-making and perspective-taking. More importantly perhaps the difference in the results from the two sets of data provides an indication that organizations need to emphasize the benefits from project reviews and documentation and explore ways in which the documents produced can be made more useful as boundary objects to encourage the sharing of learning across projects